by Bob Stanley
The best singer, by a distance, was Dusty Springfield, a vision in mono chrome on Ready Steady Go!, eyes sooty with mascara. Originally she was part of a folk trio called the Springfields; when she heard the Exciters’ girl-group screamer ‘Tell Him’ (US no. 4 ’63) on a trip to New York, she knew she had to make a break. Within weeks her knickerbocker glory of a debut ‘I Only Want to Be with You’ (UK no. 4 ’63, US no. 13 ’64) was on the radio – and it hasn’t been off the radio since. It liberated the Sandies, Lulus and Twinkles by reinventing the American girl-group sound for the girls of Bradford, Bellshill and Bournemouth. 1966 provided both Dusty’s biggest hit, ‘You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me’ (UK no. 1, US no. 4), which she had heard while competing in the ’65 San Remo song festival, and her best, the philosophical ‘Goin’ Back’ (UK no. 10), written by Goffin and King. The lyric (‘I’m returning to a place where I was young enough to know the truth’) is perfectly matched by Johnny Franz’s arrangement – compressed piano intro, muted woodwinds, a fast burst of brass. The vocal is soft, playful, seductive, an invitation to eternal happiness. It’s not outrageous to suggest Dusty Springfield is the most emotionally engaging singer Britain has ever produced.
For every Dusty there were a dozen Glo Macaris, Martha Smiths and Cheryl St Clairs, teenagers shunted into Pye studio B for two hours one morning in 1966. A couple of singles usually emerged, a bunch of promises, then came marriage, kids and a chest in the attic with a few photos and some scratched discs with a bright-pink label, curios from a misspent youth that was over before it began. Lorraine Silver from Golders Green was just twelve when she cut the graphic ‘Lost Summer Love’, a Wigan Casino classic some years later. Dee King12 (‘It’s So Fine’) got her break by dint of running Birmingham group the Ivy League’s fan club; then there was Maxine Darren from Manchester (‘How Can I Hide It from My Heart’); Deano from Cardiff (‘Baby Let Me Be Your Baby’); Nita Rossi from Bournemouth (‘Untrue Unfaithful’); Jenny Wren from Dudley (‘Chasing My Dream All over Town’); Truly Smith from Warrington (‘My Smile Is Just a Frown Turned Upside Down’). They all cut one or two heart-rending singles, paeans to pain, gave us the essence of their teenage frustration. Almost without exception, they were washed up at seventeen.
The London hinterlands were particularly flush with pale-lipped singers. Essex alone gave us Hornchurch’s Tammy St John, Purfleet’s Pamela Blue, Southend’s Antoinette and Dagenham’s Sandie Shaw. Sandie rose above the also-rans after her manager, Eve Taylor, found ‘Always Something There to Remind Me’ on a song-shopping trip to the States. The Lou Johnson original, all side-street stoicism, collar turned up against the rain, had been pure New York, but with the Breakaways’ chattering backing vocals, Kardomah cafe strings and Sandie’s aching performance, the song’s location became Streatham, Bolton, Walsall; this was the story of any girl in any town, any suburb, choking back tears at the bus stop outside the Mecca ballroom. Sandie and songwriter Chris Andrews then came up with one of the strongest runs of British singles ever: ‘Girl Don’t Come’, ‘I’ll Stop at Nothing’, ‘Long Live Love’, ‘Message Understood’, ‘How Can You Tell’, ‘Tomorrow’, ‘Nothing Comes Easy’, ‘Run’, ‘Think Sometimes about Me’, all UK Top 50 hits from ’64 to ’66. They were as close as pop got to British New Wave cinema: there was Sandie being chatted up by fast worker Albert Finney at the bar; there she was again, bespectacled this time, eating oranges on a park bench with Tom Courtenay. And she was the carefree beatnik who wanted to take her prevaricating boyfriend on the milk train down to London in Billy Liar, the girl who was pregnant at seventeen in A Kind of Loving, the girl who somehow made it onto TV in Smashing Time. She was all of them at the same time. Sandie Shaw conveyed the small dramas and private disappointments of girls outside Swinging London looking in.
‘She’s not really pretty in the accepted sense of the word,’ said a columnist in Fabulous in 1965, ‘but she’s really got something. I think she’s a knockout person.’ Sandie did it for all the girls left stood up in the rain, for all the girls on Pye who never had a hit, the Lorraine Silvers and Tammy St Johns, the ones who evoked the rainy-street pathos of the rest of England in 1966. By the end of the decade she’d married a fashion designer, and even had her own range of shoes. All of this became possible with London as the pole star of pop culture.
Another Pye girl, Anita Harris, sang an obscure Burt Bacharach song called ‘London Life’ in ’66: ‘In this cold umbrella weather, boys and girls keep warm together … this London life is the life for me.’ Not every one was buying into this self-celebratory scene. At the end of the year, the Kinks released ‘Dead End Street’ (UK no. 5, US no. 73): ‘We both want to work so hard, we can’t get a chance.’13 Within a year the pound would be devalued and the British economy in freefall. On the flip side of ‘Dead End Street’ was ‘Big Black Smoke’: if the A-side was about the indigenous working classes, the flip detailed, with the relish of Hogarth, a naive arriviste’s descent into the gutter – ‘Every penny she had was spent on purple hearts and cigarettes.’ As it climaxes in a head-spinning drunken swirl, Dave Davies plays the grotesque town crier, screaming ‘Oh yea!’ until the sorry girl puts her hands over her ears, closes her eyes and blocks out London.
Ray Davies was a sly writer, with an eye for small details. The Kinks could have followed a similar path to the Who if they’d wanted – they’d created the freakbeat template after all. But in late ’65 Davies wrote four songs for a semi-acoustic EP called Kwyet Kinks and one of them, ‘A Well Respected Man’, was a slice of lower-middle-class observation straight out of Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying. When it became a US Top 20 hit in early ’66, Davies felt emboldened. His incisive satire made him the Wyndham Lewis of his day. In 1965 he had suffered a nervous breakdown; during his recuperation he listened to Frank Sinatra, while taking note of the spiralling fame and prestige of his contemporaries (the Kinks, it should be noted, did extraordinarily badly from industry dealings in spite of their success). The first song he wrote on the other side of his breakdown was ‘Sunny Afternoon’ (UK no. 1, US no. 14 ’66), which blended the blear of Sinatra’s bar ballads with the Lovin’ Spoonful’s dappled drowsiness (their first ’66 hit, ‘Daydream’, must have had a heavy radio presence) and a lyric about the poor-little-rich-boy Establishment. Was it about old money or new? Who was guilty of ‘drunkenness and cruelty’? It could have been about an heir to a coal-mining fortune or a newly rich bass guitarist. The Kinks knew that swinging London – especially in its Sgt Pepper fashions – was about imperial decline, an end, not a beginning. Look out, they said, here come the seventies.14
There are astonishing key changes, even tempo changes, astonishing cadences, unequal phrase lengths, the works.
‘Dead End Street’ ushered in a brief period of English social realism with a cartoonish bent: there was Cat Stevens’s ‘Matthew and Son’ (UK no. 2 February ’67), the Beatles’ ‘Penny Lane’ (no. 2 March ’67), Pink Floyd’s ‘Arnold Layne’ (no. 20 April ’67), the Who’s ‘Pictures of Lily’ (no. 4 May ’67) and the first David Bowie LP, which was peppered with gravediggers, adult babies and girls with a military fetish. All of them were a twisted response to an image of Britain emulsified in Roger Miller’s ‘England Swings’ (US no. 2, UK no. 13 ’66); these songs evoked a weird, repressed island where men in raincoats lurked in the bushes. Duncan Browne’s ‘On the Bombsite’ was a gorgeous baroque single on Immediate that didn’t chart, but was a tidy reminder that, yes, there were still bomb sites in London twenty years after the war. Britain was no longer a world power. Old military outfits were on sale in junk shops, picked up by the new anti-war generation. The fictitious England that existed in American imaginations – somewhere between Oliver! and Uncle Fred in the Springtime – was vividly and hilariously portrayed in Herman’s Hermits’ movie Mrs Brown You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter: starring Peter Noone as a Dickensian urchin with only a greyhound for company, it mangled the English language (‘you saucy knave!’) to its own ends. Mrs Bro
wn was released in 1968, more than a year after the ground had shifted in the US: England had swung its last swing. Now California called the tune.
1 He was back in the studio three years later, quieter, possibly wiser, and recorded the Checkmates’ largely unheralded but exquisite ‘Black Pearl’. Within a year he was working with the Beatles.
2 Buddy Holly bucks this trend.
3 This single, which broke their run of UK number ones by only reaching number five, also had a startling promo film shot by Peter Whitehead in which the Stones applied make-up and dressed as middle-aged women. It’s still jaw-dropping to watch – no one broadcast it at the time.
4 From ‘Ronnie’ (US no. 6 ’64) until the gently psychedelic, non-charting ‘Saturday’s Father’ in 1968, the label credit on their singles read ‘The Four Seasons featuring the “sound” of Frankie Valli’, suggesting that the notes he emitted weren’t all from his mouth, that they were somehow manufactured, or that Valli really wasn’t of this planet.
5 It starts in the key of F# and modulates five times before concluding in the key of B.
6 Gainsbourg has proved a long-term influence, but one who barely registered in Britain or America at the time, despite scoring a UK number one (‘Je t’aime … moi non plus’) in 1969 (it rather appropriately reached number sixty-nine in the States) and writing a Eurovision winner for France Gall in ’65. As pop prankster, general cynic, provocateur and talented musician, Gainsbourg has posthumously assumed the mantle worn in the late sixties by Frank Zappa – the difference in the longevity of their influence is mostly down to the fact that Gainsbourg clearly loved pop and Zappa didn’t; he was anti-pop. Both toyed with the form, but Gainsbourg was capable of writing truly beautiful songs, ones that reached into the darkness beyond the Top 40, without the need of raspberry-blowing to proclaim their otherness. With over forty years’ distance, it’s hard to work out what Zappa was trying to achieve.
7 Staff Sergeant Barry Sadler’s ‘Ballad of the Green Berets’, a US number one in 1966 (and weirdly a UK number twenty-four – who the hell bought it?), had a regulation martial beat but a delivery that failed to stir, either towards or against the war it was presumably promoting. Certainly it wasn’t actively offensive, unlike Victor Lundberg’s ‘An Open Letter to My Teenage Son’ (US no. 10 ’67).
8 Another quirk of French pop in the sixties is that there were no singles, only EPs in thick, glossy sleeves. Compared to the blank ‘company bags’ that housed most British and American singles, they looked extremely desirable – they also explain why many French sixties pop stars were more about a cool image and ravishing looks than callow talent.
9 Shel Talmy produced their first three – ‘I Can’t Explain’, ‘Anyway Anyhow Anywhere’, ‘My Generation’ – and the first album, which included their anthem, ‘The Kids Are Alright’. An American based over here, Talmy was also responsible for all of the Kinks’ singles up to 1967, as well as Coventry girl group the Orchids’ raucous ‘Love Hit Me’ and Davy Jones and the Lower Third’s droning freakbeat ‘You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving’. He decided to save what was left of his hearing by working with Roy Harper (1968’s ‘Come Out Fighting Genghis Smith’) and producing Pentangle’s first three albums. Almost everything he touched is worth investigating.
10 At the time of writing, Dodd has survived Entwistle by a decade.
11 A perennial fairground favourite in the UK, it reached number three when it was reissued in 1972, and number seven just four years later.
12 Dee became a successful TV actress in the seventies and eighties after she changed her name to Diane Keen.
13 Other non-swinging-sixties London songs include Donovan’s ‘Young Girl Blues’, Lorraine Silver’s ‘Happy Faces’ and – atmospherically if not directly lyrically – Jackie Trent’s ‘Where Are You Now’.
14 When the seventies arrived, Ray Davies ceased cloaking his satire. Starting with an album called Lola versus Powerman and the Moneygoround, his decline was horribly swift and though there was the odd glimpse of his once pin-sharp writing skills (‘Moments’ in ’71, ‘Father Christmas’ in ’77, ‘Better Days’ in ’81), the Kinks’ dense concept albums became incredibly hard work to listen to. At the same time, curiously, they became a major stadium act in America.
20
ENDLESS SUMMER: THE BEACH BOYS
The Beach Boys had been the biggest noise of 1966. At the year’s end, with the NME readers’ poll rating them best group, ahead of the Beatles, they were putting the finishing touches to their Smile album. Its centrepiece would be ‘Surf’s Up’, the song premiered in Leonard Bernstein’s Inside Pop. With ‘Good Vibrations’ they had put themselves on another plane to anyone else: ‘At present our influences are of a religious nature,’ said Carl Wilson, and nobody questioned him. ‘Not any specific religion but an idea based upon that of Universal Consciousness. The concept of spreading goodwill, good thoughts and happiness is nothing new, but it is our hope. The ideas are there in “God Only Knows”, “Good Vibrations”, “Heroes and Villains” and it is why the new LP is called Smile.’ The February issue of Rave revealed: ‘The Beach Boys hope to return to Britain in May, and we can be certain of one thing when they do – they’ll bring all that’s futuristic in pop music ’67.’ No one doubted this for a second.
The world waited for Smile. And waited. In the spring of ’67 Capitol issued the two-year-old album track ‘Then I Kissed Her’ as a UK single, and it reached number four. Beyond that, nothing. The Beach Boys were due to headline the Monterey festival in California in June. It would be the non-pop world’s first real glimpse of the flower generation. If 1966 had been about the common cause, with everyone rallying behind Brian’s ‘Good Vibrations’ while hoping to emulate it for the good of all mankind, Monterey unintentionally built a wall that would take years to dismantle. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Who and Otis Redding would all take a major career step at Monterey. All could be regarded as ‘heavy’. The Beach Boys were ‘soft’.1 When the line-up was announced, Brian Wilson – with a bunker mentality and the weight of the expectant, impatient pop world on his mind – panicked. A few weeks earlier the Beatles had released Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to the widest acclaim of any modern pop album before or since – ‘a milestone in pop music’, Record Mirror had called it. Almost immediately, Smile was abandoned and the group pulled out of Monterey; the critical plaudits went instead to the Jimi Hendrix Experience, making their US debut. ‘You will never hear surf music again,’ drawled Hendrix. He wasn’t kidding. By the end of ’67 the Beach Boys were history. They had sold a million copies of every American album they released from 1962 to 1966; 1968’s Friends could only shift twenty-three thousand copies.
* * *
Brian Wilson was pop’s own Charlie Brown. He had been a sensitive boy, attuned to pre-rock harmonists the Four Freshmen on his radio, and clouted by his father Murray for the slightest misdemeanour. He grew up with younger brothers Dennis and baby Carl in Hawthorne, California, a nondescript adjunct to Los Angeles. Along with cousin Mike Love, they sang harmonies around the kitchen table.
Beyond the Four Freshmen, their primary influences were Chuck Berry and the beach: Dennis loved to surf, Brian loved to watch the girls. Augmented by schoolfriend David Marks, the Wilson clan broke through with Brian’s very first composition, ‘Surfin’’, a US number-seventy-five hit in March 1962.
Surf music, fast instrumentals with juddering post-Duane Eddy guitar simulating the feel of shooting the curl or catching a wave, had first broken cover with Dick Dale’s ‘Let’s Go Trippin’’, a US Hot Hundred hit in 1961, and it was an entirely localised sound, the California equivalent of Scottish bagpipe music. What bagpipe music didn’t have, though, was the promise of sand and warmth and bikinis, a teenage Utopia, and so by 1962 surf music had infiltrated the Midwest and east coast. In 1963 it went global as the Surfaris’ ‘Wipe Out’ and the Chantays’ ‘Pipeline’ – gibberish jargon to the non-surfer – were Top 20 hits in Britain. The B
each Boys took this sonic thunder and added the Four Freshmen-styled harmonies they had sung since childhood. It should’ve sounded a bit daft, a one-off novelty at best, but instead this combination came over as the promise of a never-ending summer. Their subject matter was limited to youth, sun, girls, cars and surfing. Singles like ‘California Girls’ and ‘Surfin’ USA’ are still brought out every April at the first hint of spring sunshine. They are still exactly what you need to hear to know that winter is over.
The Beach Boys’ second single, ‘Surfin’ Safari’, went Top 20; their third, ‘Surfin’ USA’, reached number three. Surfing wasn’t a local craze any more, and Brian Wilson – the group’s chief songwriter – was turning out three albums a year of the stuff. The supply of hits – ‘Surfer Girl’, ‘I Get Around’, ‘Fun, Fun, Fun’ – seemed inexhaustible; he even gifted pals Jan and Dean a US number one with ‘Surf City’ (his dad really tore into him for that show of disloyalty). Brian was a one-man group and a super-producer all in one. In almost all his best songs – ‘In My Room’, ‘The Lonely Sea’, ‘The Girls on the Beach’, ‘The Warmth of the Sun’ – the music’s sunny demeanour was tempered with an ache. Best of the lot was 1964’s ‘All Summer Long’, both joyous and sad, a requiem for teenage kicks and Hondas in the heat. Amidst this thick cocktail of confused emotions, Brian Wilson’s main memory of the summer is captured in the opening, Animal House-like couplet: ‘Sitting in my car outside your house, remember when you spilt Coke all over your blouse?’
